No arguments on why Fedora Core 2 as opposed to anything else please. That's a long story and I don't want to detract from my actual questions.

I'm setting up a computer for an absolute newbie way accross the country. He lives very remotely and I will probably never actually meet him. I know him through email (I'm on a newsgroup of his) and offered to set him up a computer after he repeatedly complained about the problems his very low powered box was giving him with Windows 98 etc. Without him having anyone who knows Linux in his area, I want his computer to be set up as newbie friendly as possible.

Two questions then...
1. In the "Network Device Control" are seen eth0 and also the external modem, ppp0. This is what we will be using to initiate dial up. At the moment, eth0 is at the top an therefore selected by default. To activate the modem, my frined will have to slect it each time. How do I change the order of items so that the modem is the top of the list? (I think there's a config file somewhere but I'm too short on time [want to send the computer tomorrow!] to RTFM and figure out which one)

2. Synaptic is having problems downloading files it recommends for updates. A lot of repositories like ayo.freshrpms.net are giving "Access forbidden" and such like. What's going on? I checked the settings against my other computer and they seemed the same. It lists files that should be updated and then seems to either time out or say they are not there or just give "access denied" on download. Can anyone point me to settings of reliable repositories or is there another problem that might cause this? (I want my friend to update through synaptic as I have personally found up2date to be extremely temporamental)